The Two Saplings. Mazo de la Roche
“Well, I don’t know what to think.” He hesitated, then added, as with an effort,—“We’ve often wondered about Palmer’s looks. He doesn’t resemble either of our families.”
Camilla interrupted,—“But he does look like you, Mrs. Rendel. Before I spoke to you I saw you smile and—it was Palmer’s smile. He has hazel eyes, so have you.” Her eyes devoured Mrs. Rendel. “And there’s so much more! The set of the head—the curve of the chin—the bend of the eyebrows—it’s amazing.”
Mrs. Rendel replied curtly,—“It’s impossible.”
Captain Rendel looked about him. “People are staring at us,” he said. “We can’t talk about it here. Anyhow, we’re landing.”
The two boys came running up. They looked surprised, almost shocked, to find their parents talking familiarly together. Then Palmer exclaimed:
“Say, there’s the funniest-looking gull up there! It’s different than any of the others. Come and look! Golly, it’s the grandfather of them all.”
He talked on but no one heard what he said. The four stood transfixed, their eyes scrutinizing the two candid boy faces, while fearful suspicion linked them together in a chain from which they could not tear themselves.
Phyllis Rendel tried to. “There is nothing in this,” she said, “and I refuse to listen to it.”
“We must listen,” objected her husband. “We can’t shirk it. We shall have to meet again. Where are you staying?”
“At the Dorchester,” answered Robert. “Can you come there tomorrow morning? Then we’ll be able to talk in peace.”
“Yes. We’ll be there,” answered Captain Rendel at once.
“It’s been terrible to me to speak of this,” said Camilla. “But I had to. I couldn’t go on in such appalling uncertainty, could I?”
“I think it would have been much better,” answered Phyllis Rendel. She began to gather up her belongings in a confused way, as though she scarcely knew what she was doing.
All about them the other passengers were surging toward the companion-way. The two boys had not waited to hear what was being said, nor had they been conscious of the scrutiny they were under. Now they appeared carrying their private belongings. Palmer was laden with things he had picked up abroad.
“When you’ve been about more,” said Mark Rendel, “you won’t want everything you see.”
Palmer bumped against him, almost throwing him off his balance.
“You look just like a tripper back from Blackpool,” laughed Mark.
“Oh, yeah,” said Palmer.
The six were swallowed up in the crowd, down the stairs, across the gangway, on to the pier. There the spring sunshine beat down hotly. Gulls circled and whimpered above them. Porters shouted. In the Customs sheds it was cool and draughty. The Wyldes, under the letter W, the Rendels, under R, were quite separated. Yet a shadowy but powerful bond linked them together. None was so conscious of this as Camilla Wylde. She felt feverishly excited. She had a feeling of exaltation, as though she held the threads of their destinies in her hands. She had one more glimpse of the Rendels. She saw Captain Rendel’s head above the crowd, then glimpsed all three as they got into the car sent to meet them by Phyllis Rendel’s mother. Robert was engaging a taxi. Their luggage was in a neat pile.
CHAPTER III
A FIRE had been lighted in Mrs. Stuart-Grattan’s drawing-room but so far it was only a bright-coloured crackling blaze that threw little heat. The room was chilly. But its large windows looked on to Regent’s Park in its living springtime brightness, so that the room was cheerful. The trees in the Park seemed to surge with life, billowing one after the other in their bright verdure, with here and there the rosy fountain of a pink hawthorn in flower. Two little girls in pale mauve coats and hats and carrying large brightly-painted hoops were just entering the tall iron gates with their governess. A nurse, in sober grey, was pushing a perambulator and at the same time manoeuvring two small dogs on leads.
There were flowers in the room. Gay polyanthus had been planted in large pots and these gave the effect of a tiny garden in the window. Captain Rendel stood looking down at them, avoiding his wife’s eyes.
“If you knew,” she said, “how I loathe doing this you wouldn’t ask me to.”
“That’s just being stupid,” he answered tersely. “We must face facts. If we didn’t we’d have no peace in the future. The thing to do is to clear up the mystery, whatever it is. You keep on saying there’s nothing to it. If you’re so sure of that, why are you afraid to go?”
Her low voice broke into harshness,—“Would you be willing to give up Mark?”
“No. No more than you. But I think Mrs. Wylde is absolutely sincere and deserves some consideration from us. God, we had all this out last night, didn’t we?”
She answered brokenly,—“I scarcely slept an hour.”
“We shall all of us feel better when we’ve sifted the thing to the bottom.” He looked at his wristwatch.
In the taxi they scarcely spoke, he looking through the window at the moist, gleaming spring streets, she straight ahead of her, seeing now the face of Camilla Wylde, now Mark’s face, now, with a stab of apprehension, the face of the strange boy with his long-lashed hazel eyes so like her own.
Camilla and Robert were waiting for them in their sitting-room. Robert, with a forced air of nonchalance, asked them if they would have cocktails. They took sherry instead. The four raised their glasses to their lips and set them down. Robert’s hand was trembling. Camilla was the first to speak. Her voice was tense.
“I guess none of us had a very good night,” she said, “and I guess we’ve a pretty hard time ahead of us till this thing is cleared up. I, for one, can’t have a minute’s peace till it is. It’s like a nightmare, isn’t it?” Her eyes swept the faces of the other three.
Robert’s face was a sallow mask of weariness. Captain Rendel looked cool, almost imperturbable. But in Phyllis Rendel’s eyes there was a cold hate and resentment.
“How do you expect to clear it up?” she asked. “And, if you find that the babies really were exchanged, do you think we shall have peace then?”
Camilla exclaimed, with a dramatic gesture of her small hand, on which an emerald flashed:
“I’ll throw the whole enquiry up, if you others think we ought to!”
“No,” answered Captain Rendel decidedly. “It’s too late for that. I wish you’d tell us, Mrs. Wylde, just what grounds you have for suspicion, outside what may well be a chance resemblance between our son and your husband.”
“Very well,” she answered. “We’ll speak of the resemblance first.” She took another sip of her cocktail to steady herself. Then she rose and went to a drawer in an occasional table. She took a box from it and returned to her seat. She moved gracefully. She wore a black suit and a very small black-and-white hat. Her feet were beautifully shod. A silver-fox cape lay on the back of her chair. She was quite calm now, and again she had that look of exaltation.
“I have a daughter of seventeen,” she said. “Her name is Janet and she just adores her father. We have a photo of him, taken when he was twelve, and I brought it with me on this trip so I could have a miniature painted from it by a distinguished artist I know in London. It is for Janet’s birthday. He has already done one of me from life and one of Janet from a photo. When we arrived at the hotel yesterday this box was waiting for me. It contains the miniature and the photo it was made from. I’ll let you see them.”
She opened the box and took from it the miniature, which she handed to Phyllis Rendel, and gave the photograph to Captain Rendel. There was dead silence in the room while husband and wife bent